By Stephen Smoot
“People come from all around,” said Lou Belcastro about the popularity of one of Shinnston’s favorite pastimes. It’s not the national pastime of baseball, but a game with far older and even imperial origins.
It’s easy to see why many in Shinnston and around north central West Virginia go bonkers for bocce!
Some form of the game of bocce was over six centuries old when Egyptians constructed the Great Pyramid of Giza to house the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Khufu. The game is known to date at least to 5200 years prior to the birth of Christ and perhaps even back to 9000 BC. Play of the game traveled to Greece at the end of that region’s Dark Ages in 800 BC, close to the time when Homer composed The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Like the modern United States, the Roman Republic, then Empire, excelled at absorbing the traditions of other cultures, making it their own, then re-exporting them. Roman trade ships and caravans drove throughout the Mediterranean Sea and crossed deep into Africa and Asia.As the website Bocce.org explains, “in early times they (the Romans) used coconuts brought back from Africa and later used hard olive wood to carve out bocce balls.
Over the centuries, bocce did not become the sport of mere kings, but of Roman Emperors and continued as such after the fall of that great state. “Beginning with Emperor Augustus,” the sport’s site reads, “bocce became the sport of statesman and rulers. From the early Greek physician Ipocrates to the great Italian Renaissance man Galileo, the early participants of bocce have noted that the game’s athleticism and spirit of competition rejuvenates the body.”
So naturally, the Italian word “bocce” derives from the Latin term “bottia,” which in English translates to “boss.”
The sport traveled through time from Classical Rome to the city-states and minor kingdoms on the Italian Peninsula. What the Romans embraced, the Renaissance Italians tried to ban. Italian magnates felt that their subjects ought to spend more time training in the military arts and several Popes felt that it contributed to a gambling epidemic.
Others disagreed with those assessments, especially the English. Elizabethan England adopted the game as its own, almost on an obsessive level. It was said that Sir Francis Drake insisted on completing a game of bocce before helping to lead Queen Elizabeth I’s fleet to take on the Spanish Armada. Over time, England, then America, transformed the Italian bocce into a somewhat different game – the British sport of bowling.
Despite the commands of their rulers, Italians from nobles to peasants loved the game. When immigrants from Southern Italy and Sicily came to America in the late 19th and early 20th century, bocce came right along with them.
“We usually have red balls and green balls for the flag of Italy,” Belcastro shared.
He went on to explain that a group can play four-on-four, two-on-two, or one on one. This makes it a versatile game for a fun afternoon with friends or family. A bocce set has eight balls of two colors. One can play with different sizes of balls with smaller sizes for beginners and the largest fashioned for professionals.
One of the great perks of playing bocce is that the game costs little to play, whether for fun or organized competition. One can buy a good set for $20. Belcastro noted that joining the Shinnston Bocce League and playing a full schedule is generally cheaper than a single game of bowling when all chip in for the team’s entry fee.
In the Shinnston League, a four man team pays a $100 entry fee. A two man team pays $20 per person and one-on-one costs only $15 per person. Within the league as it progresses in the season, “you play many games. You play everyone at least once.”
Also, the League built the Shinnston court with the area’s hot summers in mind. The court lies in the shade of an open sided structure that lets in air and shields out the sun.
Winners earn prize money, but that isn’t the players’ priority. “It’s not the money. It’s the competition and the camaraderie,” Belcastro explained.
A coin flip decides which side gets to toss out the pallina, also called by some a jack. This object then becomes the target. Individuals must try to throw their balls in such a way as they land closest to the jack. If the ball ends up touching the pallina, it’s called a “kiss.”
“I’m a knocker myself,” laughed Belcastro. As in croquet, a player can target another ball to gain an advantage.
Points are earned based on the final proximity of each ball to the pallina. “You play to 11,” Belcastro said, adding that “points are earned by how many of your balls are close to the pallina.” A team must win by two, however.
Anyone can and does play bocce. It offers the player good exercise and fresh air, but those of almost any physical size and strength can compete. While in some areas, their leagues remain strictly a male activity, not so in Shinnston. In the League here, Belcastro says “women and men can be on the same team mixed.” He added with enthusiasm, “And these women are good!”
Whether it be the exercise, the fellowship, or the fun of it all, bocce seems to keep its players young regardless of age. Belcastro spoke of one lady in Fairmont, aged 102. “She drove and she played bocce. You’d never guess she was 100 years old!” He went on to say “any age can play, you see. It’s just fun!”
Today, 25 million people play bocce regularly, making it the third most popular sport globally. It also serves as a fun and exciting symbol of the strength of an Italian tradition dating back millennia, but as fun and exciting in the West Virginia of the 21st century Anno Domini as ever.